Gone Girl
Okay, first of all, I grabbed Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl because I'd heard it was fun, but I didn't know anything about it other than that it was a twisty thriller. So imagine my glee when I discovered it's centrally about a puzzle hunt! I had so much fun with this book! If you like puzzles and puzzle hunts, this is the thriller for you.
I really enjoyed it and have lots of thoughts, but I think that it probably is better here if I actually use a cut tag to hide the spoilers. I know, I know. Maybe it's the post-Yom Kippur trying not to be as much of an asshole as usual. Feel free to engage even if you haven't read the book, if you want.
Readings of Gone Girl that are interesting to me
- The book is a narrative of post 2007/8 recession life. Nick and Amy were living in New York City off Amy's trust fund until stock market losses, spending beyond their means, and job cuts in the New York publishing industry push them out into Missouri (AKA real America). And in this context, the fact that both of them are conniving sociopaths who refuse to reckon with the collateral damage of their hostilities is supposed to read, I think, as an allegory about the harms Wall Street caused to real America. It's almost like it's saying it's fine if Wall Street stays in New York, ripping each other off, as long as the damage doesn't spill out beyond the Hudson.
Flynn isn't sure she believes in real America, though. Nick and Amy move out to rural Missouri (Carthage, Missouri, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the other major Missouri locale in the book is Hannibal... the sense of a proud, fallen civilization is the key thematic idea here), but they don't move into a friendly place with a rich sense of community, they move into a neighborhood full of slightly rundown McMansions and neighbors who are always playing status games. If there was ever a real America nestled somewhere in flyover country, Wall Street already despoiled it years ago, and Nick and Amy are waging their battles in its ruins.
Later, Amy spends time hiding in a cottage deep in the Ozarks full of Southern rednecks escaping the wreckage. It is no better, the outsider loners pretend to befriend her and make her one of them, only to assault and rob her when they find a way to take advantage. Even in the real America, everyone is only out for themselves.
But the book also grapples repeatedly with the glamour of New York City and its professional life. Nick's former job as a media critic at a New York glossy, which in NYC terms is objectively a fairly shitty job, makes him almost a rock star in Carthage, and he clings to it, using it to seduce Andi. Part of the pull of the Real America/ Fake America dichotomy is a sense of jealousy and longing that, critically, goes both ways. To some degree lifelong New Yorker Amy believes in the idea of the real America, she vocally expresses her desire to deny that kind of American dream to Nick in the final chapters.
- Gone Girl's message on feminism is confusing and the few reviews I've read trying to tackle it in those terms are confused. I think perhaps the cleanest feminist reading of Gone Girl is that it's about taking the anti-feminist premise at face value and plotting it out to show its absurdity. If we want to imagine that it's true that all a woman needs to do is fake a rape accusation or fake a domestic abuse allegation to destroy her man, Flynn says, wait, you're right, a woman absolutely can fake those things and destroy a man's life. All she needs to do is devote a year of her life to constructing an overly elaborate set of fabricated clues including a hundred page fictional diary, a staged crime scene (but not too staged), months of phony credit card bills, and a literal treasure hunt. On those terms, it's hard not to say the husband probably did it most of the time. There's this funny refrain throughout the later parts of the book, that Nick actually steals from a woman who is trying to flatter him, that "Ellen Abbott (the sensationalist newsmagazine reporter who loves true crime stories about abused women) has taught America that the husband always did it." I don't think we're supposed to take this at face value as a truth about the world.
There's also a sort of Amy is the hero read of the book that this review at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books wants to try (it's an example but not the only one). Amy is 'weirdly likeable', argues the writer, not just in the fictionalized diary sections at the start, but also after the reveal. Her take on male-female relations and the way women disguise themselves to attract a partner is 'on point'. And above all else, Amy has 'agency', that oh-so-important thing we're always arguing women need more of in fiction.
It's a tricky read to make, and you can tell the reviewer is ambivalent, because Amy is also a sociopath. Feminism is not about fighting for the right for women to be sociopaths. But potentially it's about fighting for the right for sociopathic women to not be spoken about in misogynistic, gendered ways when their character is described, but that's a different thing. I also think the idea of agency is a fraught one here. Another review I read, from Time, argues that Flynn's book has been criticized as anti-feminist because there are so few books with strong female heroines with agency, so hers has to carry extra weight. I'm not convinced this is true. Maybe it's rare in middlebrow literary fiction, but in romance and thrillers female characters with agency like Amy are not that uncommon. But this is the kind of juggling act Flynn forces you to make, because it's very clear that she is aware of feminist discourse and is playing with it. Agency is a thing that Amy thinks about in those terms, male control and female agency are things that she cares about.
Flynn plays repeatedly with the tropes of the modern feminist discourse. We meet poor Tommy O'Hara, who insists he's not a rapist because he's a little nebbish and rapists can't be nebbishy. And we are supposed to read this at a doubly ironic remove. First, we are aware of the contemporary feminist argument that all men are potential rapists and that the so-called 'nice guy' plays on his nebbishy exterior in order to manipulate women and make them vulnerable to his predations. But second, we are already aware by the time Tommy O'Hara appears that Amy is a sociopath and that in spite of contemporary feminist theory arguing against trusting Tommy O'Hara, poor Tommy probably actually didn't rape Amy. He's the actual nice guy, no quotes! Or hell, he's probably still a shity person in other ways, everyone in the book is, but he didn't rape Amy at any rate. It's kind of an awkward place Flynn puts us, and I don't for a minute think that it's done out of straightforward misogyny, but out of Flynn's interest in complicating our assumptions.
And at the same time, Nick is inarguably a shitbag, cheating on his wife and lying about it and gaslighting the hell out of her in the process to make her feel like she is the reason their marriage is failing, to push her towards being the one who asks for a divorce. So, like, this is not a thriller where you're rooting for our blameless hero to prove his innocence and escape the clutches of the psycho after him. You pretty much want Nick to get his comeuppance, too.
And then Amy escapes to Desi and we find that in his own way, Desi is just as much a misogynistic asshole as Nick. Everything is about control, everything is about letting Amy complete a picture in his head. She is stripped of 'agency' by a man, yet again. Except... Amy primes the pump in the first half of the book. The purpose of that narrative is to establish Nick as not just an ordinary garden variety asshole, but as the kind of asshole who would murder his wife. And one wonders if the purpose of the second half of the book narrative from Amy is to establish a similar paper trail for her murder of Desi, as a backup plan. I don't know. I made the point in some past post about feminism that it sort of doesn't matter if you're a garden variety asshole or an actually abusive asshole, the garden variety asshole is plenty of problem on his own.
The book ends with Amy impregnating herself by trickery in order to trap her man, which is very much a misogynistic trope. There is a very specific kind of sociopathy happening here. Amy Dunne is the villain from every misogynistic rant about how feminism is about trying to control men, come to life. If you come out of the book rooting for her, there's something wrong with you... but if you come out of the book saying see, this is how women act, there's something much more deeply wrong with you.
One of the weird effects this has is that Tanner Bolt, handsome, wealthy, savvy, manipulative New York City megabucks defense attorney, comes out as the most likeable character in the whole story. The book keeps cautioning you against it, reminding you how he makes his living, and yet... everyone else in the book is terrible, and Tanner is just a dude who's very good at his job and very up front about what that job is. He's not a good person either, but he's the only one in the book who doesn't lie to himself or anyone else about it, which makes him likeable in the same way Benny in Rent is troublingly likeable.
This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/356545.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.
I really enjoyed it and have lots of thoughts, but I think that it probably is better here if I actually use a cut tag to hide the spoilers. I know, I know. Maybe it's the post-Yom Kippur trying not to be as much of an asshole as usual. Feel free to engage even if you haven't read the book, if you want.
Readings of Gone Girl that are interesting to me
- The book is a narrative of post 2007/8 recession life. Nick and Amy were living in New York City off Amy's trust fund until stock market losses, spending beyond their means, and job cuts in the New York publishing industry push them out into Missouri (AKA real America). And in this context, the fact that both of them are conniving sociopaths who refuse to reckon with the collateral damage of their hostilities is supposed to read, I think, as an allegory about the harms Wall Street caused to real America. It's almost like it's saying it's fine if Wall Street stays in New York, ripping each other off, as long as the damage doesn't spill out beyond the Hudson.
Flynn isn't sure she believes in real America, though. Nick and Amy move out to rural Missouri (Carthage, Missouri, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the other major Missouri locale in the book is Hannibal... the sense of a proud, fallen civilization is the key thematic idea here), but they don't move into a friendly place with a rich sense of community, they move into a neighborhood full of slightly rundown McMansions and neighbors who are always playing status games. If there was ever a real America nestled somewhere in flyover country, Wall Street already despoiled it years ago, and Nick and Amy are waging their battles in its ruins.
Later, Amy spends time hiding in a cottage deep in the Ozarks full of Southern rednecks escaping the wreckage. It is no better, the outsider loners pretend to befriend her and make her one of them, only to assault and rob her when they find a way to take advantage. Even in the real America, everyone is only out for themselves.
But the book also grapples repeatedly with the glamour of New York City and its professional life. Nick's former job as a media critic at a New York glossy, which in NYC terms is objectively a fairly shitty job, makes him almost a rock star in Carthage, and he clings to it, using it to seduce Andi. Part of the pull of the Real America/ Fake America dichotomy is a sense of jealousy and longing that, critically, goes both ways. To some degree lifelong New Yorker Amy believes in the idea of the real America, she vocally expresses her desire to deny that kind of American dream to Nick in the final chapters.
- Gone Girl's message on feminism is confusing and the few reviews I've read trying to tackle it in those terms are confused. I think perhaps the cleanest feminist reading of Gone Girl is that it's about taking the anti-feminist premise at face value and plotting it out to show its absurdity. If we want to imagine that it's true that all a woman needs to do is fake a rape accusation or fake a domestic abuse allegation to destroy her man, Flynn says, wait, you're right, a woman absolutely can fake those things and destroy a man's life. All she needs to do is devote a year of her life to constructing an overly elaborate set of fabricated clues including a hundred page fictional diary, a staged crime scene (but not too staged), months of phony credit card bills, and a literal treasure hunt. On those terms, it's hard not to say the husband probably did it most of the time. There's this funny refrain throughout the later parts of the book, that Nick actually steals from a woman who is trying to flatter him, that "Ellen Abbott (the sensationalist newsmagazine reporter who loves true crime stories about abused women) has taught America that the husband always did it." I don't think we're supposed to take this at face value as a truth about the world.
There's also a sort of Amy is the hero read of the book that this review at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books wants to try (it's an example but not the only one). Amy is 'weirdly likeable', argues the writer, not just in the fictionalized diary sections at the start, but also after the reveal. Her take on male-female relations and the way women disguise themselves to attract a partner is 'on point'. And above all else, Amy has 'agency', that oh-so-important thing we're always arguing women need more of in fiction.
It's a tricky read to make, and you can tell the reviewer is ambivalent, because Amy is also a sociopath. Feminism is not about fighting for the right for women to be sociopaths. But potentially it's about fighting for the right for sociopathic women to not be spoken about in misogynistic, gendered ways when their character is described, but that's a different thing. I also think the idea of agency is a fraught one here. Another review I read, from Time, argues that Flynn's book has been criticized as anti-feminist because there are so few books with strong female heroines with agency, so hers has to carry extra weight. I'm not convinced this is true. Maybe it's rare in middlebrow literary fiction, but in romance and thrillers female characters with agency like Amy are not that uncommon. But this is the kind of juggling act Flynn forces you to make, because it's very clear that she is aware of feminist discourse and is playing with it. Agency is a thing that Amy thinks about in those terms, male control and female agency are things that she cares about.
Flynn plays repeatedly with the tropes of the modern feminist discourse. We meet poor Tommy O'Hara, who insists he's not a rapist because he's a little nebbish and rapists can't be nebbishy. And we are supposed to read this at a doubly ironic remove. First, we are aware of the contemporary feminist argument that all men are potential rapists and that the so-called 'nice guy' plays on his nebbishy exterior in order to manipulate women and make them vulnerable to his predations. But second, we are already aware by the time Tommy O'Hara appears that Amy is a sociopath and that in spite of contemporary feminist theory arguing against trusting Tommy O'Hara, poor Tommy probably actually didn't rape Amy. He's the actual nice guy, no quotes! Or hell, he's probably still a shity person in other ways, everyone in the book is, but he didn't rape Amy at any rate. It's kind of an awkward place Flynn puts us, and I don't for a minute think that it's done out of straightforward misogyny, but out of Flynn's interest in complicating our assumptions.
And at the same time, Nick is inarguably a shitbag, cheating on his wife and lying about it and gaslighting the hell out of her in the process to make her feel like she is the reason their marriage is failing, to push her towards being the one who asks for a divorce. So, like, this is not a thriller where you're rooting for our blameless hero to prove his innocence and escape the clutches of the psycho after him. You pretty much want Nick to get his comeuppance, too.
And then Amy escapes to Desi and we find that in his own way, Desi is just as much a misogynistic asshole as Nick. Everything is about control, everything is about letting Amy complete a picture in his head. She is stripped of 'agency' by a man, yet again. Except... Amy primes the pump in the first half of the book. The purpose of that narrative is to establish Nick as not just an ordinary garden variety asshole, but as the kind of asshole who would murder his wife. And one wonders if the purpose of the second half of the book narrative from Amy is to establish a similar paper trail for her murder of Desi, as a backup plan. I don't know. I made the point in some past post about feminism that it sort of doesn't matter if you're a garden variety asshole or an actually abusive asshole, the garden variety asshole is plenty of problem on his own.
The book ends with Amy impregnating herself by trickery in order to trap her man, which is very much a misogynistic trope. There is a very specific kind of sociopathy happening here. Amy Dunne is the villain from every misogynistic rant about how feminism is about trying to control men, come to life. If you come out of the book rooting for her, there's something wrong with you... but if you come out of the book saying see, this is how women act, there's something much more deeply wrong with you.
One of the weird effects this has is that Tanner Bolt, handsome, wealthy, savvy, manipulative New York City megabucks defense attorney, comes out as the most likeable character in the whole story. The book keeps cautioning you against it, reminding you how he makes his living, and yet... everyone else in the book is terrible, and Tanner is just a dude who's very good at his job and very up front about what that job is. He's not a good person either, but he's the only one in the book who doesn't lie to himself or anyone else about it, which makes him likeable in the same way Benny in Rent is troublingly likeable.
This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/356545.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.